วีดีโอ

I would expect it to pull at least 30 FPS given anecdotal experience

Picked one up for @275, 11/2023 on ebay. Cheapest laptop with a discrete GPU I could find. Dropped a 4tb nvme and 64gb of ram and this workhorse can do anything I need it to do and is fine for gaming, video, sound, etc. Essentially the same specs as a 2018 macbook pro 16" before they stopped putting discrete GPUs in. Handles CS:GO and DOTA fine. edit: also the first year thunderbolt was available, so it has a thunderbolt port (usb-c) as well.

Starcraft II is CPU bound and very sensitive to IPC, you'll get the best performance with Ryzen 5000 / 7000 desktop series (with or without X3D) and Intel 12000+ series. Hardware Unboxed has some benchmarks for 4v4 to compare.

What CPU do you have? This game is CPU limited in most scenarios.

No difference other than slightly high FPS

Do you understand how graphics cards work?

@@ItsNyzzyou gotta study elec/comp engineering instead. The youtube uploader is just testing the end product what the engineers made 😂😂😂

hey, you should get more performance than that - I averaged 107 FPS with a 2700X on this replay.

The game really holds up in 4K, textures are crisp and the models are relatively high polygon count! You definitely don't need a 3090 to enjoy this game in 4K, a 1070 GTX or 2060 RTX should have more than enough memory bandwidth produce high frame rates in concert with a high IPC processor.

Yes, Starcraft technically uses two threads but most of the game functions (simulation, physics, etc) are assigned to one.

@@4KClub What a bummer, the bottleneciks are real, even with my 10900K i get 100% of use on one of the cores.

I used ShadowPlay, records directly from the GPU using NVENC. Works well!

Yeah, the 12700K really shows off the double digit IPC gain over Skylake here! Excited to see how the mobile versions perform.

@@4KClub ahh I was assuming this was a laptop! Still, pretty cool. I am excited to see what Raptor Lake brings, since SC2 is supposed to be a cache sensitive game :D

For sure, these videos are to help show that there are some differences at 4K, which can be more GPU limited depending on the card. For example, the 3090 averages around 149 FPS while the 980 Ti's clocks in at 125 FPS.

Also I'll have some Alder Lake content to show the differences between Coffee Lake and that platform soon.

Same!

Hey, I can look into benching other games but its a 2060 - results at 4K are going to be pretty mixed on medium / high settings. FWIW Modern Warfare multiplayer at 4K (75% res scale) mostly high settings is 60-75 fps.

@@4KClub I didn't realise the channel is called 4k Club :D I'm interested mainly in 1080p actually.

MSI Afterburner

With an enthusiast discrete GPU, sure. Looks like it scores around 580 in Cinebench R20, the 9700K used here is only ~500.

Try the Ryzen 7 5700x

That game is CPU intensive and its mostly bottleneck. It jus dont use many threads, i think it was 2 cores/4threads, or less , lazy 2 download it for tests. Wow is also not rly multithreaded, thats even more sad for still popular game that getting developed.

Need to get an 8K monitor!

Sure does!

Zen 2 (Ryzen 2K/3K series) is not super performant in SC2 compared to Coffee Lake featured here. However Zen 3's (Ryzen 5K series) IPC increase is even better than Coffee / Comet Lake in this game. I would guess the 3700X is holding the game back, as it is largely CPU bottlenecked up to 1440p. You can see a replay featuring hardware similar to yours showing around the same FPS here th-cam.com/video/afFB2jW7dtw/w-d-xo.html You can see that one core on the 3300X is pegged the entire time and tops out around 100 FPS. The 3700X and 3300X boost clocks are similar so I would expect similar performance. I would recommend upgrading to a 5600X or 5800X if you want more frames.

Issue? Your eyes cannot perceive any more than 60fps so I would say your eyes are the limiting factor or bottle neck.

@@bighands69 big diff between 60 and 144 fps

@@JesusIsLord7773 As a number yes but you visual system is not going to see the difference.

@@bighands69 ya boi trollin hard or he blind

RIP indeed

agree, also who cares about graphics on sc2 tbh?

This game is CPU limited below 1600p with lower end cards. I assume the 2.6Ghz i7 you mentioned is a laptop chip, like the 9750H. This will not be sufficient for 4v4 in intense battles at 60 FPS, depending on unit count I don't think this is possible on any current CPU at any overclock. That level of IPC throughput doesn't exist yet. If you have a replay you want me to test upload it to drop.sc and I can try it. From a GPU perspective I would expect the 1660 Ti and 980 Ti to perform the similarly at 4K, with some edge to the 980 Ti because of its increased memory bandwidth. Memory bandwidth appears to be a limiting factor in this game above 1600p according to Maguro www.maguro.one/2019/09/performance-testing.html#HighResSlowdown

@@4KClub Hey thanks for the answer. That's what I was thinking. Maybe it's better to get a desktop PC instead of a laptop? I play 4v4s almost everyday so I need a machine that can handle that in 4K. I dropped a replay on that site. Let me know what the results are :) - Should I post the link here?

@@danawakes2001 I would suggest desktop over laptop for SC2 4v4 because laptop turbo boost frequencies will be much lower due to power limits. Go ahead and post the link here!

@@4KClub ok awesome - I'll have to learn how to build a PC then (unless you can recommend a pre-built one). drop.sc/replay/17153253

Hey man, were you able to test it with the replay?

Hey - I could but it should be very similar with slightly lower frame rates in heavy scenes since the game is totally CPU bound on effectively one thread. I dont have a 10900K to test but I would expect around 8% better performance (5.3Ghz vs 4.9Ghz) given zero IPC increase clock for clock vs Coffee Lake based on my benchmarks.

4K Club makes sense. Do you think, increasing RAM Hz can help? To use this hardware with 16gb DDR4 4000or more hz?

@@viliamgregus7543 Faster RAM speed definitely boosts the 1% lows quite a bit, I went from lows of 55 FPS to 82 FPS by swapping from a 2666 MHz kit to 3200 MHz. It will also raise your avg FPS, but not as much as overclocking any Skylake derivative would. I saw around +10 FPS avg on a 9100F with a weaker memory controller than the 9700K used in this video. I would expect to see decreasing returns going past 3200 MHz but it will depend on your platform (Intel / AMD). To see how 3rd gen Ryzen handles SC2 at various speeds see Maguro's article: www.maguro.one/2019/10/dram-performance-testing-in-starcraft-2.html This game is primarily CPU bound re: avg FPS and 1% lows, followed by memory speed. It will be interesting to see how Zen 3 does given the purported 19% IPC boost in lightly threaded games like SC2.

That was my assumption as well, and its true up to ~1440p. Some cards, notably the RX 580 bottleneck at 4K. You can see some additional data here www.maguro.one/2019/09/performance-testing.html. I'm curious if he's right and GPU memory bandwidth becomes more critical above 1800p, I plan to test this further.

@@4KClub I am on 1440p rather than 4k, but sc2 also utilizes around 50% and 2gb of vram of my gpu at 144 fps (when the cpu allows it), meanwhile my cpu core (sc2 only uses 1 of them) is at 100%. I wouldn't be surprised if the 3gb of vram isn't enough on 4k, but then again the 1060 6gb exsists, and all the newer better performance/cost gpus like 1650, 1660, ect. I have actually managed to hit 100% on my gpu before, but I only did so while in the editor on a super complex maximum size map (thousands of doodads and units) whilst zoomed out enough to view the entire map at once. And that is not even possible in real games because there are hard capped limits to the render distance of shadows and to an extent other things which the editor doesnt have to conform to.

Is it really true that sc2 is more cpu intensive rather than GPU? Idk if I should invest in a better GPU or cpu. I want to play in nothing lower than 4K. I’m used to playing on an iMac in 5k (I know lol) so downgrading go anything less than 4K is a no no for me. I want to build a pc strictly for this game since it’s the only game I play and I’m hesitant precisely because of the cpu vs gpu dilemma.

@@danawakes2001 I have a 10700k and a 1060 3gb and my cpu is usually the bottleneck when on 1440p maxed settings. I mainly play an arcade game I make with hundreds of units so naturally its escecially cpu intensive. In another map I made with a huge amount of decorative models and not many units, I actually got a gpu bottleneck, but I was also at 150 fps. In general though, sc2 is highly cpu intensive and pretty much a cakewalk for the gpu. Fast ram also helps to get the most out of your cpu performance. A current gen 200$ gpu could probably get at least 80fps on 4k ultra (for reference 4k 60fps is about as intensive as 1440p 144fps) You want to prioritize having a cpu with fast single core speed and fast ram

@@danawakes2001 If you're going to build a rig just to play this game you should prioritize CPU and memory clock. With Ryzen 5000 dropping this week promising up to 18% IPC increase over existing Intel chip it would be interesting to see how they perform in SC2 given 1T Cinebench scores being over 600. FWIW my testing has shown a correlation with Cinebench scores / SC2 avg fps.